so here's the update, this seems odd to me:
I went out and bought a 1g stick of pc5300 ram (it was late saturday, went to futureshop and they had no 1g pc6400). I can put the 1g stick into slot 1, 2g into slot 2 and I get 3g of ram - each stick reads fine in cpu-z. So its not the motherboard.
But if I put either of the 2g sticks in slot 1 (I tried both) with the 1g stick in slot 2, only the 1g works.
So it appears that slot 1 will not take the 2g pc6400 ram.
The previous ram I had was 2g sticks of pc5300, it always read the 4g just fine in both dimm slots, but didn't always run in dual channel.
So now I'm hoping that if I put a 4g kit of dual channel pc5300 ram in (robotnik has a kit of kingston, only its kingston value
) then maybe it will work.
Or maybe a different brand of pc6400 might work?
My motherboard specs state 1.8v ram, so what would happen if I put say 2.1v ram in? There's this little bit of info on the website:
"Due to the High Performance Memory design, motherboards or system configurations may or may not operate smoothly at the JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) standard settings (BIOS Default on the motherboard) such as DDR2 voltage, memory speeds and memory timing. Please confirm and adjust your memory setting in the BIOS accordingly for better system stability.
Example: Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 PC-6400 operates at 2.0V, 4-4-4-12.
For more information about specification of high performance memory modules, please check with your Memory Manufactures for more details"
Does that just mean that if I had a fully capable bios, I'd be able to change the ram voltage? Am I safer to just stick with 1.8v ram?
Thanks for the help, I really do appreciate it.